1STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER BRENDAN CARR Re: Auctions of Upper Microwave Flexible Use Licenses for Next-Generation Wireless Services; Comment Sought on Competitive Bidding Procedures for Auctions 101 (28 GHz) and 102 (24 GHz); Bidding in Auction 101 Scheduled to Begin November 14, 2018, AU Docket No. 18-85. The FCC has been moving aggressively to ensure the United States can win the global race to 5G—to ensure that our regulations are 5G Ready. Last month, we took concrete steps to enable more Americans to benefit from 5G by modernizing our approach to the deployment of wireless infrastructure. On the spectrum side, we were the first country in the world to allocate high-band spectrum for 5G. And with this Public Notice, we are taking the next step towards bringing over 1.5 GHz of millimeter wave spectrum to auction. The Chairman deserves credit for pressing ahead and ensuring we were ready to hold these auctions as soon as Congress provided us with the authority to do so. The FCC’s forward-leaning approach to 5G benefits everyday Americans. You see, 5G is about more than abstract broadband speed and lower latency. It’s about enabling the next-generation of innovation and entrepreneurship in America. It’s about autonomous cars—which could reduce the number of traffic deaths from the 40,000 per year we see today to nearly zero. It’s about the industrial Internet of Things and smart city applications—which could revolutionize the way we live, work, and play. And it’s about delivering remote surgery and telehealth applications to communities that today lack the healthcare options they deserve. We are already seeing glimpses of this connected future. Just last week, I visited a ranch in the rural Amargosa Valley of Nevada. Ponderosa Dairies has 15,000 cows—and each is tagged with an RFID chip. So they joke that these are “connected cows.” The RFID chips track the livestock and report back vital information on their health. In turn, this data is transmitted over a wireless broadband connection to a veterinarian, who lives a number of states away. A few months before that, I visited Mississippi where C-Spire is testing 5G technologies. And I toured the University of Mississippi Medical Center outside of Jackson. Using wireless broadband, they are bringing healthcare services to rural communities that would otherwise lack access to specialists or even basic care. Through remote patient monitoring, the Center helps screen and treat patients with diabetes living in some of the most rural parts of the Magnolia state. And before my Mississippi trip, I visited General Electric in Houston and learned about their work developing 5G Internet of Things and remote monitoring applications that can drive greater efficiencies and productivity across many sectors of our economy. As interesting as these experiences all were, they only hint at the new innovations we could see as next-generation networks come online. But back in the here and now, we continue to have work to do to enable this future. And that work includes adopting the detailed and admittedly weedy technical rules for our first high-band 5G spectrum auctions. So I am glad we are starting that process today. As we do so, the FCC will continue to move quickly to identify and auction additional spectrum bands for 5G and other innovative uses. 2I want to thank the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau for its work on this item and for its continuing efforts as we proceed to auction. The item has my support.